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GOOD NEWS FOR THE SPACE AGE
Akbar Abdul-Haqq

Man seeks perennially to transcend himself. He longs to change for what he
considers to be good. He can change in two possible dimensions only. He can
subdue and control outward circum- stances to his advantage. He may also change
for good by spiritual and moral progress within himself.

One distinguishing characteristic of our age is man's preoccupation with material
affluence to the increasing exclusion of spiritual needs. Und6r the impact and
promise of the technological sciences, this concern to make life physically
comfortable tends to become an end in itself. For many it has become a religion
and philosophy of life. No longer are they interested in other realms of truth,
but seek to subject all transcendental aspirations and intuitions to the gross
world of five senses. This type of secularism may be rated unique in history.
Even the renaissance of religion all over the world is symptomatic of a continual
enslavement of man, in the disguise of spirituality, to the grossly mundane
interests of life. Secularism has invaded the very heart of religion and the
church, too, is becoming more and more 'of' the world. On modern religious secularism,
Dr. H. Kraemer has remarked: "A great deal of religious life of mankind...
is merely very crass materialism and a massive natural secularism, related to
objects known as religions. To express it still more adequately, the objects
of religious worship and worship itself, are in this case means exploited to
satisfy man's coarse and materialistic hunger for life; what goes by the name
of 'religion' in the world is to a great extent unbridled human self-assertion
in religious disguise. The whole world of magic and a great deal of religion
are the expression of this human exploitation of the so-called 'divine' world.
This dominant but concealed materialistic vitalism in religion is not a specific
characteristic of the East, but of man all over the world, and therefore in
all the religious areas of the wor3.d in the West and in the East, one can notice
it in differ forms " (The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World,
pp. 212-213)

A peculiar secular mentality therefore governs the life of modern man in the
temple as well as in the world. He tacitly assumes that human life is limited
by sense experience and that pursuit of pleasure is its goal. He seeks to justify
this outlook on the basis of science, even though modern science cannot really
support it. Dr. W. G. Pollard, Director of Oak Ridge Nuclear Institute, writes:
"No scientific bases whatever exist for the universal assumption that the
explanation for everything which is and happens in space and time must be found
within space and time. Yet, the sheer unanimity of agreement on this axiom of
the entire educational process gives it an unassailable dogmatic force. In liberating
man from false superstitions, science has unwittingly locked him securely in
another prison house of its own making. This prison is exclusive bondage to
nature and the natural. Modern man cannot even conceive any longer of any possible
way of escape from nature. He cannot imagine any place transcendent to nature
where he might go if he were to leave it. In many ways this bondage is worse
than ancient bondages from which science has liberated man." (Space
Age Christianity, p. 33.)

The Lord's famous parable of the rich fool speaks even to man in this wonderful
space age, who seeks to gain not only the whole world but possibly the whole
universe. In the process he has lost his own soul. Even some prophets of secularism
have sensed the great loss. Thus, Carl Jung titled one of his searching books
in the field of depth psychology Modern Man In Search of a Soul. Unfortunately,
even modern psychology has not helped the modern man to rediscover the lost
dimension of his soul.

The modern man has thus been robbed of the transcendental and spiritual aspects
of his destiny. He finds no way out of his peculiar dilemma. When he seeks instinctively
to transcend himself, he ends up by debasing himself in the name of contemporary
science, philosophy, art and morality. Of the influence of contemporary philosophy
upon modern man, P. A. Sorokin writes: "Like science, contemporary philosophy
has also contributed its share to the degradation of man and his culture. First,
in the form of the growth of mechanistic materialism for the last few centuries;
second, in the debasement of truth itself either to a mere matter of convenience,
or to a mere fictional arbitrary convention, ideology or rationalization; and
third, in making the organs of the senses the main and often.the only criterion
of truth .... Truth reduced to a mere convenience or convention destroys itself.
For this reason the very difference between true and false disappears."
(The Crisis of Our Age, P. 245-246.)

Contemporary art has likewise suffered tragically under the secularizing trend
of the age. It has lost power to help man transcend his littleness, and leaves
him debased. Sorokin remarks: "...Contemporary art is primarily a museum
of social and cultural pathology. It centers in the police morgue, the criminal's
hideout and the sex organs, operating mainly on the level of social servers.
If we are forced to accept it as a faithful representation of human society,
then man and his culture must forfeit our respect and admiration. Insofar as
it is an art of man's debasement and vilification, it is paving the way for
its own downfall as cultural value." (Ibid., p. 67.)

Sorokin goes on to comment on other areas of the aesthetic: "Still more
conspicuous is the pathological bent in literature, painting and sculpture.
In these fields the heroes are.... the warped and morbid characters of Hemingway,
Steinbeck, and Chekhov and the like consisting of insane, and criminal types,
hypocrites, the disloyal, the wrecks and derelicts of humanity." (Ibid.
, p. 66)

Saint Paul's apt description, "the God-of this world has blinded their
minds," seems to fit even those in the Church who in establishing dialogue
with the world secularize the very Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. They quietly
assume the unproven secular dogma that there is no reality beyond the world
of nature, sense perception, space-time and the "here and now." Thus,
going into the world supposedly to help secular man rediscover his lost soul,
they accept the dogmatic presuppositions of the secular mood without truly critical
examination, and create their own secularized versions of the Gospel. They aim
at denuding the Good News of the spiritual and transcendental.

The so-called new morality is another trend hastening the total depravity of
the age. There is, of course, nothing new about it except the odd fact that
here the old immorality is called morality. Even then the perversion is not
entirely new. It is at least as old as the times of the prophet, Isaiah, who
wrote: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness
for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for
bitter" (Isaiah 5:20).

The civilized man is psychologically sick and the more cultured and civilized
he now becomes, the more sick he will be. For modern man is seeking to feel
at home in the world without any reference to God and the transcendental.

Philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and other students of man and society
in our time agree, by and large, as to the sickness of the secular world. Even
their diagnoses agree in general not only with each other but also with the
insights of the Bible. By his own admission, however, is no panacea for his
ultimate ills visible to the secular man.

And yet the strange situation is that on the one hand he cries for help in
his desperate sickness, while on the other hand he refuses to consider even
the possibility of a panacea beyond the range of his ability. Incorrigibly he
seeks secular remedies for his illness of secularism. Any talk of meeting his
need in and through the spiritual and transcendental dimension leaves him in
rebellion and violent reaction.

There is no logical justification for such a reaction. It is a mystery which
at best may be accounted for in terms of the blindness of the mind which has
too long been chained to an anti-spiritual mentality. The basic predicaments
of life as understood by the secular mind are border problems because they are
beyond man. Modern man has learned to talk about his border problems without
a readiness to raise border questions. That is one reason why he is not willing
to cross his self- prescribed borders of possibility into a possible new realm
of comprehension, encounter and existence.

It would be worthwhile for a messenger of the Gospel to our modern world to
be sure of the Biblical perspective on the incurable ills the secular man is
declaring about himself.

1. Emptiness

The famous Swiss psychologist, Dr. Jung, held that the central neurosis of
our time is emptiness and meaninglessness. A consciousness of an ultimate emptiness
in life is reflected clearly in modern art, literature, philosophy and life
as a whole. One may attempt to describe this emptiness in terms of the five
year old girl, who was found crying bitterly by her parents. The parents could
not easily find out what she really wanted. After long persuasion, however,
the daughter said to her father, "Daddy, I want something, but I do not
know what." The secular man often finds himself in such a mood even in
the most affluent societies of this world. As a matter of fact, much of the
available evidence suggests that the more affluent a society is, the more pronounced
is the sense of ultimate emptiness on the part of its members.

As to reasons for this emptiness in the Western prosperous societies some sages
have made guesses. Karl Jaspers considers a secular mentality responsible for
the situation: "The despiritualization of the world is not an outcome of
the unfaith of individuals but is one of the possible consequences of a mental
development which here has actually led to nothingness. We feel the unprecedented
vacancy of existence, a sense of vacancy against which even the keenest skepticism
of classical times was safeguarded by richly peopled fullness of an undecayed
mythical reality." (Man In the Modern Age, p. 20.)

This loss of contact with God has not been felt keenly by the average man today
because psychology has attempted to provide a substitute for it. Otto Rank remarks:
"Psychology is searching for a substitute for the cosmic unity which the
man of antiquity enjoyed in life and expressed in his religion, but which modern
man has lost -- a loss which accounts for the development of the neurotic type."
(Beyond Psychology, P. 37.)

The Bible tells us that in the deepest reaches of his personality man is so
constituted that he needs God. The experience of the bottomless pit of emptiness
on the part of the modern man is certainly due to his secularism whereby he
is cut off arbitrarily even from a serious thought as to the possibility of
the divine world. This alienation from God is the very heart of human depravity
according to the Word of God.

To fathom the spiritual emptiness of the non-Christian and the secular Christian,
one needs to hear his talk about God. That is an acid test for any religious
group. Thus, when we listen to a Hindu or Moslem describe the ultimate nature
of God, we realize soon that they talk in endless negatives. God in His nature
remains unknown to them. The founder of Buddhism had an overt agnostic attitude
towards God. But the emptiness of the Buddhist soul appears in the concept of
Nirvana. There has been endless discussion among the Buddhist scholars as to
the nature of Buddha's concept of Nirvana. However, it cannot be gainsaid that
it is negative, and the term “emptiness" used by some Buddhists in
regard to it (Shunwad) is very descriptive of an existential truth about the
soul of a seeker after truth. In this connection the cry of 'death of God' within
Western Christianity is another indication of the basic emptiness felt by the
secularized Christian. The concern to demythologize the Gospel is likewise partly
an attempt to conform to the mentality of secular man. Thus, the Hindu or Moslem
description of God's nature in endless negatives, the Buddhist Nirvana and the
secular Christian theologian's concern to demythologize or to declare the death
of God all rise out of a basic emptiness of his soul.

The forty-second Psalm expresses an aching emptiness of soul. But the writer
goes on to state the source of satisfaction, when he says, "As the hart
panteth after the living water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, 0 God"
(Psalm 42:1). It is part of the tragedy of 'emptiness' today that modern men
feel the pangs of spiritual hunger and the pant of divine thirst, and like babes
fill the air with their cries, not knowing what they really need. Some of them
have taken to thumb-sucking in terms of various escapes from emptiness. But
they keep crying for something, they know not what, which may satisfy them deeply.
The Gospel of the one who said, "I am the Bread of Life" remains the
only answer for the empty man today.

The spiritual famine across the world in our time is of greater moment and
far-reaching consequences than any spectre of food scarcity that may threaten
some areas of the world. Unfortunately, the era of spiritual leanness is upon
the whole human society and the starvation of the human mind and soul has reached
alarming proportions!

2. Loneliness

As a result of his spiritual alienation, man today is also experiencing loneliness.
The psychologist does not seem to have penetrated the deep mysteries of the
nature of this loneliness. But the phenomenon itself is the subject of much
attention and discussion on the part of the sages of the secular society. The
psychologist Eric Fromm observes: "We have developed a phobia of being
alone; we prefer the most trivial and even obnoxious company, the most meaningless
activities to being alone with ourselves; we seem to be frightened at the prospect
of facing ourselves." (Man For Himself, p. 44.)

There are different kinds of loneliness. A person may feel lonely for a friend.
Again, he may feel lonely for wife or children. But deep behind it all there
is a variety of loneliness which may be called 'existential loneliness.' It
has to do with man's relationship to God. This loneliness has a peculiar way
of appearing on the scene most unexpectedly when a person may be deep in enjoyment
of human company. On such occasions a man may feel a pang of sudden loneliness
in the presence of a most beloved friend. This mood he may attribute to some
lack or change in the friend. He may not stop to realize that the lonely feeling
is the cry of his soul for neglected fellowship with,God. As a result the secular
man may find himself making scapegoats of friends, children or wife instead
of attending to his existential loneliness in the right way. That is why a person
alienated from God may go from divorce to divorce and from friend to friend
looking for that 'one' and 'only' who seems always to elude the grasp. Even
in the twentieth century man is still attempting ineffectually to hide the nakedness
of his lonely soul behind the fig leaves of a thousand and one eacapisms. The
problem with escapisms is that they only lead to ever-confusing and dissipating
blind alleys. The secular Christian preaches the escapism of an abstract Gospel
of service to humanity without a point of departure in an encounter with the
living God. Thus, we hear an exclusive emphasis on the social implications without
a concern for the divine orientation of the Gospel. Some would even forget the
divine rootage of the Good News completely. The secularized Christian tends
to make his social concern a religion by itself. Therefore, he talks about the
plight of man with no worthwhile interest in the destiny of man.

People who belong to non-Christian religions have other escapisms from existential
loneliness than mere humanitarian- ism. Many seek to escape in terms of various
auto-suggestive practices. The Hindu system of 'Yoga' is a good example of escape
from loneliness through self-hypnotic techniques. Again, drug addiction has
been another classical way of escape from existential loneliness offered in
the name of religion. Thus, for example, tracing the role of Indian hemp in
Indian religious philosophy, Norman Taylor writes: "For centuries nearly
every system of Indian philosophy or religion is inextricably bound up with
Indian hemp. At least 1600 years ago cultivated Hindus set out to explore the
emotional and fantastical properties of hemp ... their object was to produce
some flight from reality less harmful than most others, and to produce an effect
different from any other." (Narcotics, P. 17.)

The use of euphoric drugs by the Islamic mystics, Buddhist saints or religious
men in any ancient society is a story well-known. Alcoholism and drug addiction
in the secular world also is symptomatic of the spiritual sickness we have called
here 'existential loneliness.' It should not be construed as merely an escape
from the external strains and stress of modern life. It is more of an escape
from the stress of a soul out of touch with God. The cure, therefore, of the
problem lies primarily in a moral and spiritual dimension than medical and physical
alone.

3. Guilt
The Bible tells us, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."
The basic sickness of the entire humanity originates from man's alienation from
God -- 'coming short of the glory of God.' This existential estrangement of
the natural man is the root cause of all his personal and social problems. The
centrality of guilt has been recognized by the psychologist. However, the question,
what constitutes guilt exactly and why is it part and parcel of the mental life
of man?, is something beyond the reach of psychology. Freud tried to explain
away guilt in his early attempts to understand man. Nevertheless, it kept coming
back to him as an inevitable fact of mental life. Most of the psychologists
today acknowledge that guilt is a constituent element in the mental life of
the secular man and that it cannot be put by lightly. Mowrer writes: "Guilt
is the central problem -- not just guilt-feelings, as Freud so benignly suggested,
but real, palpable, indisputable guilt.... Where neurosis or psychosis is purely
functional (as it usually is) the individual, I believe, always has a hidden
history of serious misconduct which has not been adequately compensated and
redeemed." (Crisis in Religion and Psychiatry, PP- 56,57.)

We should take a second look at the Biblical account of the tower of Babel.
For man's concern to build metropolitan areas, and to reach out for heaven in
terms of civilization and culture, may all be a grand manifestation of the ever-increasing
guilt of a creature in rebellion against God and out of touch with the spiritual
ground of his being. Freud clearly saw the growth of guilt in the whole march
of civilization. Unfortunately, no cure for guilt is available to man on his
own. Even psychology cannot help him beyond certain ameliorative measures which
leave the central sickness unhealed.

Mowrer protests against the whole secular psychological approach, to the problem
of guilt: "The fact is that those persons who are most deeply burdened
and broken by guilt and moral failure are now quite regularly turned over by
the churches to the state for care and treatment... I have also cited extensive
evidence for the assertion that the state mental hospital as a therapeutic agency,
is a failure and that the time is upon us for rethinking the whole attempt to
help guilt-ridden persons in a secular, medically controlled setting."
(Crisis in Religion and Psychiatry, p. 167.)

It seems that the situation involved in psychiatric treatments is to help the
guilt-ridden, sick individual integrate with a guilt-ridden, sick society. For
the guilt feelings of the secular and spiritually alienated man are poles apart
from confession or repentance. McKenzie remarks: "Unfortunately we cannot
take the guilt feelings as signs of repentance. for, as often as not, these
guilt feelings are a sign that the offending tendencies are very active, although
repressed; there is no change of heart, and the guilt feelings, by preoccupying
the individual's mind, act as a self-defense of a repetition of the prohibited
behaviour." (Nervous Disorders and Religion, p. 75.)

The problem of guilt remains unsolved both in religion in general and in psychiatry.
The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world offers not only to remove
the disease of guilt but also its penalty of death towards God. A regenerated
person becomes reconciled to God. He is born a new being in Christ, and his
old nature prone to sin and guilt is crucified.

4. Fear of Death

Our age has rightly been characterized as an age of anxiety. All anxiety is
due ultimately to man's fear of his own death. According to the Bible, Satan,
the archenemy of man holds his tyrannical sway over mankind through fear of
death.

"Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also
himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy
him that had the power of death, that is the devil; And deliver them who through
fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." (Hebrews 2:14,
15.)

Many psychologists agree with the above insight into man's fear of non-being.
Thus, Herman Feifel writes: "Gregory Zilboorg, a noted psychiatrist, has
stated that fear of death is 'present in our mental functioning at all times.
Melanie Klein, the English psychoanalyst, believed that fear of death is at
the root of all human anxiety. Paul Tillich, the renowned theologian, bases
his theory of anxiety on the orientation that man is finite and must die. The
Austrian psychiatrist, William Stekel, went so far as to express the hypothesis
that every fear we have is ultimately fear of death!" ("Death,"
Encyclopedia of Mental Health, Vol. 21 p. 438.)

The fear of death which is experienced in our age in an unprecedented way,
is so acute that the subject of death has become the forbidden subject. Theologian
Helmut Thielicke has pertinently observed that death is coming to have the same
position in modern life and literature that sex had in Victorian times. Psychologist
Rollo May feels that this type of repression "is what makes modern life
banal, empty and vapid, we run away from death by making a cult of automatic
progress, or by making it impersonal. Many people think they are facing death
when they are really sidestepping it with the old eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-you-die.
Middle aged men and women who want to love everybody, go every place, do everything
and hear everything before the end comes. It is like the advertising slogan,
'If I have only one life... let me live it as a blonde.'" (Time,
"Death kit a Constant Companion," Nov. 12, 1965, P. 52.)

Not only the man-in-the-street but also those who deal with the fear of death
and the dying are themselves victims of the fear. Psychologist Faifel writes,
"Even psychiatrists seem reluctant to talk or write about death. And in
the textbooks of psychology, there is not a paragraph on the topic of death."
He goes on to observe about medical doctors: "This writer has completed
a pilot study on the attitudes towards death of a group of physicians. The group
consisted of thirty, male physicians, mostly internists and a few surgeons with
an average age of 39.2 years. The result shows that the physicians think about
death less than decontrol groups of patients and normal subjects. Counterphobic
attitudes toward death and relief from unmitigated tragedy are undoubtedly at
work. Provocative, nevertheless, is the additional finding that the physician
group is more afraid of death than either the patients or normal subjects. This
writer submits that some physicians often reject the dying patient because he
reactivates or arouses the physician's own fears about dying." (Encyclopedia
of Mental Health, p. 445.)

The Bible reveals the truth that God did not create man for death. Death came
on the scene due to sin and human alienation from God. This insight is not only
a revealed truth but also an existential experience. Even though some people
have indulgently tried to look upon death as something natural, its unnatural
character is manifest in a real situation. Life and struggle for existence go
together. If death were natural, this phenomenon would be inexplicable. The
very existence of the fear of death, which is the root of practically all human
fears, is a clear indication that death is unnatural even though its incidence
is universal. The biological tension between life and death becomes conscious
on the level of man. According to the Bible God created man in His own image,
with a hunger for eternity. Therefore, despite all the evidence, of mortality
around him, man remains incorrigibly thirsty for life. Even those who commit
suicide are not tired of life but only of the problems of life. Suicide is,
to them, an escape mechanism. Even though a man on the street knows better,
yet he tends in his daily life, to live as if he was going to live forever.
This anomaly of existence is so lucidly displayed in the case of modern atheistic
existentialism. This movement has been conspicuous in rediscovering death as
a philosophical theme for our secular age. It offers modern man the prospect
of a meaningless life in view of a meaningless death. It leaves no justification
at all for a prolongation of earthly existence. According to Albert Camus, "There
is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide." Despite
the crippling pessimism of their popular philosophy the existentialists justify
continuation of life. None of the great exponents of the movement have committed
suicide. Their rationalization is poor when they say that men must live for
the sake of living. But it is a grand demonstration of the truth that man wants
to live despite all evidence of death around him. This is not due to any philosophical
conviction. It is a phenomenon nourished by the springs of a passion for eternity
deep within the human soul.

The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ brings the dayspring from on high for a
world shivering in the icy consciousness of death and crying for true life and
meaning for an earthly existence which by itself seems so absurd and out of
joint. The grace of.God Most High has appeared in His Son, our Saviour, the
Lord Jesus Christ,, "Who hath abolished death, and hath brought life and
immortality to light through the Gospel" (11 Timothy 1:10). The Christian
hope of eternal life is not a sheer flight into the beyond. It involves conquest
of death, in history, through the appearance of the Son of God in flesh. The
Christian faith is a resurrection faith. If the Lord Jesus Christ be not risen
from the dead, then the Gospel has no meaning and Christians, according to Saint
Paul, are the most wretched among men. The Lord Jesus did not come into the
world to establish one more religion alongside many religions already in existence.
He came to fulfill the deep- est longing of man for life and release from death
and its horrors -- longings expressed in various ways among the religions of
mankind. By His own declaration the Lord says, "I am come that they might
have life and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). This
abundant life, a life victorious over the predicaments of our earthly existence,
is the verv burden of the Gospel.. In the entire known history of mankind none
ever made such astounding claims as did the Lord Jesus. His claim to give the
kind of life that man innately is groping for, is based on the fact that, "In
Him was life and the life was the light of men" (John 1:14). The life that
He offers was tested and tried in the crucible of human experience as He dwelt
among us. He proved the worth of His gift of life for us by conquering absolutely
sin, evil, disease and death. He actually turned death, the chief weapon of
Satan against man and creation, into a secret of victory over the diabolic powers
of darkness. Thus, conquering death and sin upon the cross and through His resurrection
He has now made available eternal life to all mankind.

The Gospel of'the Lord Jesus Christ has opened up a new way out for the hard-pressed
man who is a stranger to God. This transformation takes place in the world but
it is not of the world. At the same time it is a blessing to the world. Man
seeking to sublimate his dark impulses and to reform society has now got himself
into such a serious mess that the very future of the human race is at stake.
Humanly speaking, there is no exit. To reject the offer of God-in-Christ is
to doom the future of man and civilization. Therefore, the words of the Scripture
are more pertinent for our age than ever before, “How beautiful upon the
mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace;
that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto
Zion, Thy God reigneth!” (Isaiah 52:7)